Second Sunrise of the Day, part 1

Second Sunrise of the Day (part 1)

Happy New Year and a strange first post submitted to this interesting project, Culture Kitchen. Wasn't sure how to start or where to start really. Just learning my way around Culture Kitchen space. So, I figured I'd be bold. I took the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz and I have very little in the way to worry about in terms of pride, you see.

This post was prompted by something Shakespeare's Sister asked. While responding, I ended up writing the following.

Every summer, we built a fort by the creek. We’d scavenge lumber, oil drums, and corrugated tin and cinder blocks, metal tubing, and railroad ties from the state agency building across the street.

We’d raid dad’s workshop­which I used far more than dad ever did. The only time I remember dad venturing in there was to capture one of the gerbils that had escaped and squeezed beneath the closed door. Unfortunately, Herbie scooted under the gas furnace and that was the end of Herbie. Hammers, nails, latches, saws­all were carefully trundled to the creek along with stolen lighter fluid, matches, and marshmallows. Not far away was a carpet store where we’d raid remnants of carpet, padding, and vinyl flooring from the waste bins. We’d roll it up and one would hold one end between the handle bars on the bike taking up the back end of the caravan. The other, the one out front, would hold onto the roll from behind, peddling the bike up the small hill, balancing the carpet between the two bikes.

Toward the end of spring, when summer recess hadn’t begun, but the smell of summer was in the air, we’d start the yearly fort building. Each year was an opportunity to build one bigger and better and longer-lasting than the year before. We’d start then, working long into the evening after school and all day on weekends. We wanted it ready for summer when the trees and bushes would grow heavy with leaves and clusters of deep red sumac berries. By then, our fort would be completely hidden from our parents and the weird kids who attended a little red school house that crowned the center of the street we all shared. They wouldn’t play with us, even though we would easily play on their playground, ball field, and sidewalk (for hopscotch and jump rope).

It was behind the little red school house where we’d build our fort, at the foot of a small hill. In the winter, it served as a slick, challenging hill for sledding and tubing. We’d build snow forts, elaborate snow people, and sled for hours in the snowy cold. Little red-cheeked girls bundled up in snowsuits or layers and layers of winter coats, leggings, pants and 5 pair of socks. We’d be out there so long, we’d warm up and sweat, the moisture quickly turning to icicles hanging from the wisps of hair that escaped from our hats, scarves, and hoods.

With sledding, the trick was to work up the most speed and swerve at the last minute to avoid the not-yet frozen creek. Or, when it finally froze solid, to get up enough speed to land on the creek and­whee!­swerve at the last minute to finish up the run racing like maniacs along the swollen, frozen solid creek slick with that dusting of snow on ice that makes for­whee!­speed.

After the winter flooding and freezing of our creek, we’d be left with a creek shore that was slick, soggy mud even in the late spring. We didn’t care. It was the perfect place for fort building. By the time summer recess liberated us, it would be solid, cracked clay earth beneath our sneaks. The creek-side fort building, legend had it, had been going on for generation after generation of boy kids. But this was a neighborhood with only girls. For whatever reason, all the families had girls around the same 7 year span. Not a single family of the thirteen had a boy that wasn’t an infant or wasn’t over 18.

Fort building would carry on, even if it was the domain of boy kid space for generations before us. The generation that had done the annual fort building before were mysterious once-boys, now-teenaged and young adults. They were home for the summer from college or a job in a bigger city. They had long, unkempt hair. So different from Dad men. Sometimes we’d catch them haunting their old fort space, sitting around our fort space, surveying the scene and laughing deep, hearty laughs. We’d hide in the tall grass in the overgrown abandoned field behind fort space, watching and noticing that they had a musty sweet scent that was a lot like Dad men, but just a little different. Nope, they weren’t Dad men. They were odd. They disrupted our world because they were something-in-between-boys-and-men. So, we crouched in the tall grass and breathed deeply, taking in the scent of musky sweetness that was not-men-and-not-boy, the mark of the not-quiet-dad-men and-the not-boisterous-boy-kids.

What did they do, we wondered, that was not what we did? Why were they boys, but not really boys? Why were they men, but not really men?

Dad men, they were quiet. The not-dad-men-not-boy-kids? They talked. They laughed. They whispered in deep conversations to one another. They sat around, sometimes silently, together, kicked backed while a fire burned brightly spilling a wide glow of excess and absence beyond fort space. Not-dad-men-but-not-boy-kids, though, did something that both Dad men and boy kids did.

We’d watch, sshhhing each other as they became silent, a quiet comfortable silence filled with excess and absence. A fire crackling. A bullfrog croaking. A fish splashing. And we waited, as the wind whistled over the tall grasses where we hid. Waiting for that inevitable moment when the silence would be broken by the breaking of wind and a round of “he did it, not me

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